The website of writer Kelly J Baker

Yesterday, I posted my reflections on the Norway massacre at Religion in American History. The post describes the particular hesitance to employ the label “Christian terrorist” for the accused perpetrator. What started as Facebook musings became long post. I have much to say about religion and violence as well as the deep desire to claim that Christianity can somehow be separate from these discussions. My post spills over as I tried to reckon with this tragedy and the larger media response.

One of my Facebook friends asked a question I have been asked a dozen times in a dozen different ways: How do you study this? To which I still don’t have a great answer. I usually respond with the tried and true, “Somebody needs to.” But, that answer is not entirely genuine. Of course, someone needs to. The question, instead, is why do I? The real answer is less formulaic, more personal, and telling. And it is not open to public consumption just yet. But rather, I ask another set of questions: why/how does violence get deeply intertwined with religion? (Or hatred? Or intolerance?) What do we learn at this intermingling, or rather this cohabitation? And why is there a reluctance to study these cohabitation as religious? Why do we try so hard to separate (some) religions from violence and not others? How does the focus on extreme violence obscure the ordinariness of violence and harm in every day life? Why can’t some be qualified as terrorists?

What is a Christian terrorist?

So, this isn’t our normal fare here at RiAH, but I couldn’t help but draw attention to the concern over the language of Christian terrorism in the American media coverage/speculation about the recent terrorist actions in Norway. What is it about the label “Christian terrorism/terrorist” that bothers so? And how does domestic terror in the U.S. also get coded? (Hat tips to Paul Harvey, Matt Hedstrom, John Koyles, Jeremy Russell, and Mike Altman for links and Facebook conversations that lead to this post.)

“We now live in an age of unprecedented violence….Reliance on coercive power as the primary method of convincing others corrodes the moral fiber of society, creating a world shorn of human sensitivity, justice and a stable order….The penchant for stereotyping the other is frequent, true self-examination is uncommon. ”—Deepak Tripathi

On July 22, 76 people died in a bombing in Oslo and an attack on a Labor Party summer camp on the island of Utoya in Norway. The Guardianlabeledthe event “one of the worst atrocities in recent European history.” The Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik stands accused of both attacks, and yes, he admitted committing both crimes while also labeling them “atrocious” and “necessary.” Though media speculation suggested early on that the bombing in Oslo was an act of Muslim terrorism, the accused Breivik is not a Muslim. Rather the “terrorist” in question is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white guy with reported ties to both the European Far Right and Christian fundamentalism. At Religion Dispatches, Mark Juergensmeyer pushes the analysis further by pointing out that Breivik, like Timothy McVeigh, is not just a terrorist but a Christian terrorist. He writes poignantly:

If bin Laden is a Muslim terrorist, Breivik and McVeigh are surely Christian ones. Breivik was fascinated with the Crusades and imagined himself to be a member of the Knights Templar, the crusader army of a thousand years ago. But in an imagined cosmic warfare time is suspended, and history is transcended as the activists imagine themselves to be acting out timeless roles in a sacred drama.

For Juergensmeyer, both young, white, “self-enlisted soldiers” believed that their acts would “triggers a great battle to rescue society from the liberal forces of multiculturalism that allowed non-Christians and non-Whites positions of acceptability.” Both were the opening salvo in a battle to save their respective societies from the lethal grip of leftist politics/policies that they believed prevented white Christian men from attaining their rightful places of power and dominance. While Juergensmeyer and the European news outlets have no problem identifying Breivik with Christianity, specifically Christian fundamentalism, there is a hesitation, a slip even, in some American news coverage. What does it mean that he might be a Christian terrorist? Why would we associate Christianity with a “madman”, “a “lone gun man”, or a deranged individual? What is at stake in associating Christianity with terror? At USA Today, Cathy Lynn Grossman queries:

Who here knows exactly what’s meant by Norwegian Christian fundamentalist?…Is he a terrorist because he’s Christian or a Christian who happens to be a terrorist or, if he’s a terrorist, can he really be a Christian at all? And isn’t that exactly the same points Muslims make about terrorists who claim to be Islamic?

The desire to separate Breivik’s terrorist actions from his religious affiliation is telling. Note Grossman’s central question: can a terrorist really be Christian? These questions assume that terrorism and Christianity can easily be parsed out. They are separate becomes a statement of fact. This “fact” then obscures that religion and terror can be intimately bound, informed, constructed, and embodied. The desire to separate says more than the separation. The rhetorical move suggests the clear hesitation in binding Christianity to a powerful word such as terrorism. (I’ve written on why we need to focus on this before here and here.) What emerges as more important, however, is the desire to ignore Breivik and the tragedy he created. Separation leads the way to obfuscation.

On his radio show, Glenn Beck labeled Breivik a “mad man” while also making it clear to listeners that the European Right and the American Right are not comparable (to which I say, what?). Moreover, Beck uses the tragedy to make larger claims about the threat of Islam, multi-culturalism, and the Left in general. “Multi-culturalism and political correctness are killing Europe” rather than the hostility and anger about such that pushed Breivik into defensive action. Beck further claims that the summer camp was a political camp akin to the “Hitler Youth.” His quick reference to Hitler shifts the focus from the massacre of teenagers to the so-called dangerous politics of the camp. He further asks, “Who would do political camps for kids?” The answer seems to be only liberals, who thus endanger their own children. (For the entirety of Beck’s opinions on Oslo and Utoya, click here.)

The Wall Street Journalran an editorial about how the Oslo bombing was committed by extremist Muslims. Today, they provide an opinion piece by Bruce Bawer, who writes about the threat of “radical Islam” for Europe. Breivik reportedly admired his writings on the Islamic threat. Bawer begins by stating that he, like “pretty much everyone,” imagined that the “Islamic terrorists” bombed Olso. Importantly, he shifts gears to argue that Europe’s multiculturalism is to blame for Breivik’s actions. If Europe continues down the path to “Islamization,” then Bawer assures the reader that extremists like Breivik will continue to act. After all, Europe isn’t protecting citizens from the “rise of Islam.” For both Beck and Bawer, the accused terrorist is not the most important component of a tragedy that claimed 76 lives. Rather, these actions (while “atrocious” and “necessary” in Breivik’s own terms) become the stepping stones to critique Islam’s so-called threat to both Europe and America as well as a way to bash the despised political correctness that supposedly suffocates modern culture. The real tragedy is the larger fragmentation of society because of dreaded multi-culturalism’s attachment to diversity and difference, not the loss of life. A white Norwegian man killing fellow Norwegians to defend the nation (and even a continent) from its citizens gets lost in the translation. A white Christian extremist becomes an outlier, and there is no articulation of the possibility of Christian terrorism. It doesn’t exist in this rhetorical overindulgence.

Obscuring the obvious questions becomes part of a certain nationalist agenda, in which Muslims remain deeply wed to terrorism. In the case of Oslo and Utoya, Muslims and terror were invoked (and continue to be invoked) in spite of the fact that no Muslims were involved. Ignoring even the possibility of Christian terror ignores the way in which terrorism has political, racial, and religious baggage. By making Breivik simply a crazy individual, we avoid not only his act of Christian terrorism but also the daisy chain of white Christian (male) terrorism in Europe and the U.S. We should quit labeling these events as sporadic, random, and loosely connected, and instead, wonder what connects McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, the Hutaree (white Christian militia), Breivik, and the Ku Klux Klan. The answer might be a potent imagining of white Christian nationalism that assumes only white men can defend, save, and destroy us. Thus, they act, retaliate, and harm to recreate/fight for a fabled white Christian nation (or continent), free from the troubling demands of diversity.The yearning to get back to a moment of power and dominance (even though, in many instances, white men are still the folks in power) leads to not only inflamed and insensitive rhetoric but also violence and brutality. Perhaps, we should find the connections in their imaginings to understand why they fight/maim for a“cosmic battle” between good and evil. Perhaps, we should rid ourselves of the assumptions about Muslims and terrorism because with these casual assumptions we might never be able to reckon with the possibility, much less the reality of Christian terrorists.

While Paul is away, the blog will go on (and on) with a new series on religion and masculinity (see Charity’s first post here) and the long overdue return of the Gender and the American Religious Historian series. We have to keep all you readers busy, so y’all breathe a deep sigh of relief when Paul returns. Anyone, contributor or guest poster, who would like to submit posts to either the masculinity or the gender series, please send it along to kellyjbaker (at) gmail (dot) com. The more the merrier!

Happy Wednesday everybody! Here are some must-reads for the middle of the week.

First, the Center for the Study of Religion & American culture posted the proceedings from the second biennial conference. The proceedings from the 2009 meeting are also available. RiAH bloggers provided our thoughts on the conference (Elesha’s here and here, Janine’s here, Paul’s here and mine), and now, the excellent papers are available to all of you who missed the lively conference.

Second, check out our own John Fea‘s “Can the Study of History Heal the Culture Wars?” at Patheos. Here’s a snippet:
…I could not help but wonder if the thing that ails us most is not our failure to engage in activism, but our failure to understand and empathize with those with whom we might disagree. Perhaps our failure to bringing reconciliation and healing to our divided culture is, at its core, a failure of liberal learning, particularly as it relates to the study of history. Christians and secularists can team up in social justice projects, and Barack Obama can give stirring speeches about ending the Red State-Blue State divide, but until the American people develop the discipline of listening to one another, we will remain stalled in our attempts at reconciliation.

Third, Craig Martin interviews Manuel A. Vásquez about his More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford 2010), which I will be reviewing a bit later for the blog. Martin describes Vásquez’s project in these terms:

More than Belief is very much a “theory” book, as it provides a comprehensive introduction to modern and postmodern theories (feminist, anthropological, sociological, philosophical, psychological, neuroscientific, etc.) relevant to the study of that thing we call “religion.” Along the way Vásquez criticizes each theory considered, selects the best elements of each that he finds worth saving, and synthesizes the useful remainders into his own general theory of religion. What was astonishing to me about the book was the scope: Vásquez moves from the mind/body problem in Plato and Descartes to the rejection of dualism by Spinoza and Nietzsche, to the origins of phenomenology in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, to social constructionism in Foucault and Butler, to Deleuze and Haraway, to cognitive science of religion, and so forth (this list includes highlights from only the first half of the book—I wasn’t joking when I said “comprehensive”!). Vásquez ends up arriving at a naturalist but non-reductive materialist theory that emphasizes embodiment, practice, and global social networks.
And here’s Vásquez on the role of theory in the study of religion:

Today, I am far more skeptical that theory can solve all social problems. Although some of my Jesuit teachers were killed by the military during the Salvadoran civil war precisely because of their ideas, I am keenly aware that there is always a painful gap between theory and practice (even when theorizing is a form of practice). Moreover, I do not see the theorist as some sort of Sartrean emancipatory hero, always choosing freedom over bad faith. As Bourdieu tells us, being an authoritative theorist requires a habitus, a habitus that is formed by one’s privileged trajectory in the fields of knowledge production. Still, I do theory as a critical engagement with particular problems or impasses. I agree with Foucault that theory should be driven by a “limit-attitude,” a situated “permanent critique of ourselves.” It should grow out of “our impatience for liberty.” As such, theory should be a passionate endeavor “oriented toward the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary,’ that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.” This normative stance, which implies that theory should be useful not just in academia, but, to the extent possible, to our being-in-the-world, is a corollary of a materialist epistemology that stresses immanent becoming.

For more the rest of Martin and Vásquez’s conversation, parts one and two are available.

Well, my summer class (300 level Religions in America) is in session, so I am knee-deep in class preparation and grading as well as editorializing on Michele Bachmann and white Christian motherhood (I’ll post the link as soon as I have one).

This means that zombies and monstrosity are on my mind, but not on my writing schedule. C’est la vie! What I would like to be doing is reading Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value, which sits on my Kindle mocking me. (Yes, I have a Kindle.) For a dose of Zinoman, check out his series on “How to fix horror” at Slate. My favorite zombie commentary for the week comes from my favorite blue monster, Cookie Monster.

The newest issue of Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Beliefis now available (with a library subscription). For those of unfamiliar with this journal, it is an excellent, interdisciplinary journal that provides cutting edge scholarship on the materiality of religion. Every time the table of contents arrives in my inbox, I stop whatever I am doing to see what the issue holds. The July issue is no different, and it contains a conversation about sacred space in America with Erika Doss, Anthea Butler, Jacob Kinnard, and Edward Linenthal. From outdoor space at the U.S. Air Force Academy for Wiccans and Druids to worship to a disappearing cross in the Mojave to “the shadow of ground zero” to the Enola Gay, ordinary spaces become sacred, contested, desecrated, and defiled.

Doss argues that public debates are both “sweeping–indicative of widespread interests in claiming public spaces and places as an extension of personal values and beliefs–and presentist–driven by the inconstant and fluctuating aims and concerns of particular publics at particular historical moments” (270). What becomes sacred space and who claims its sacrality emerge as crucial components of public debate. The contributors note how questions of space, and whether it is sacred or not, become markers of deep religious intolerance in contemporary America. Contestations over sacred space become contestations over the place of religion in public life, and certain religions garner more legitimacy, cultural capital.

Butler writes about how a cross in a desert emerges in discourse as both a religious and a secular symbol, and the space it inhabits, thus, becomes significant and ambiguous. Its absence even more so. Kinnard emphasizes that the debate over Park51 becomes an”easy synecdoche” to understanding the place of Islam in the nation (275), and the all of America becomes a “ground zero” with any mosque nation-wide, a violation. Linenthal ponders the ease at which sites of mass murder become sacred to Americans and how space becomes sacred, if it can be defiled. Space can emerge as separate from the ordinary because of the “power of events on the land (279). For Linenthal, the Enola Gay, an object and a space that housed and dropped an atomic bomb, functioned both to sacralize and the desecrate, and it could not be easily managed. This space was wrought, like the other examples in this issue, with questions of legitimacy, illegitimacy, redemption, terror, and narrative authority. Who makes a space sacred and what are the costs? The confrontations over sacred space, then, provide a way to understand the place of religion in public discourse and its material presence.

Over at Religion Dispatches, I guest blog about Glenn Beck’s last show on Fox, his nationalism, and his telling of American history. Here’s an excerpt:

Beck’s mantle of telling history like it really “was” is packaged, glossy, and consumed. Yet this mantle, or even legacy, does not solely belong to him. The struggle to reclaim the nation, or “restore honor,” began long before he, the John Birch Society, Joseph McCarthy and the like joined it in the mid-twentieth century. Americans, from the Reconstruction Klan in the 1860s, the Know Nothings of the 1890s to the second Klan of the 1910s and 1920s, to home-grown Christian fascists of the 1930s, sought to protect a nation in peril from any perceived threat, be it Catholic, Jew, African American, or Communist.

In my particular area of the study, the 1920s Klan, the Knights, recruited members with both warnings of a nation in decline as well as a vision of a fabled white Protestant America, which could be recaptured, recreated, or even relived through their efforts. This nation needed defenders to protect citizens and to uplift the historical legacy of the nation. Klan leaders and newspapers provided a history of the fabled nation-state, which emphasized the Puritans, early white colonists, the Founding Fathers, and former Presidents (there are some notable absences in this reconstruction). Their jeremiads proclaimed a fragmentation of white Protestant social order while narrating a pristine, coherent history. In this way, the Klan mobilized millions of white Protestant men and women to join the order, wear robes, and burn crosses.

This desire, to narrate a certain kind of America, a certain kind of history, and defense of the nation from its despisers, binds Beck to a much longer history of intolerant nationalism than current media coverage regularly admits. (Though, Gary Laderman asks this question in a different way, when discussing the “the death rattle of the white Protestant male.”) Beck’s approach to history is a continuation of these previous attempts. He, like others, wants to protect the nation from its people and protect its people from the encroaching diversity, language of tolerance, and social fragmentation.

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The academy claims to be a meritocracy, in which the best and brightest graduate students gain employment as professors. Kelly J. Baker, a Ph.D. in Religion, assumed that merit mattered more than gender. After all, women appeared to be succeeding in higher ed, graduating at higher rates than men. And yet, the higher up she looked in the academic hierarchy, the fewer women there were. After leaving academia, she began to write about gender, labor, and higher ed to figure out whether academia had a gender problem. Eventually, Baker realized how wrong she’d been about how academia worked. This book is her effort to document how very common sexism—paired with labor exploitation—is in higher ed.